Silly, aimless, and pretentious: Rapture reads like notes for a novel that the author had the good sense to abandon.
A loose and discursive novella by Minot (Evening, 1998, etc.), who manages here to ramble on a pretty good ways in remarkably few pages.
There is a particular post-coital moment when one everything begins to seem remarkable and striking—the pattern of the wallpaper, the ticking of the clock, the hissing of a radiator in the next room. The lovers in this tale are apparently trapped in such a moment, for they offer us, from beginning to end, nothing other than the sort of gooey platitudes (“He thought of his grandmother’s driveway. That’s what popped into his head. The way it looked in the fall with orange leaves on the bright green grass”) that are best washed away with a brisk, cold shower. The story itself—which appears only in a sort of fragmentary haze—is mostly a succession of flashbacks that describe the various steps by which Benjamin Young ended up in bed with Kay Bailey. Ben is a filmmaker who meets Kay during a movie shoot in Mexico. He is unhappily attached to Vanessa Crane, a college sweetheart who runs an art gallery and wants to marry him. Kay keeps some distance from Ben, although she is fascinated by certain parts of his body (“It was a curious organ, taking one form in repose, then becoming quite transformed when activated”), and she doesn’t seem ready to commit herself to anything. Ben, on the other hand, knows that he is not in love with Vanessa (“He still loved her, he’d always love her, but he wasn’t in love anymore”) and suspects that his true happiness will have something to do with Kay. If this all sounds rather vague, try to imagine it being narrated in the third-person: “I mean, here was Kay now, performing fellatio on him when she’d told him a year ago she never wanted to see him again. He didn’t get it.” Neither do we.
Silly, aimless, and pretentious: Rapture reads like notes for a novel that the author had the good sense to abandon.Pub Date: Jan. 28, 2002
ISBN: 0-375-41327-8
Page Count: 112
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2001
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BOOK REVIEW
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.
Life lessons.
Angie Malone, the youngest of a big, warm Italian-American family, returns to her Pacific Northwest hometown to wrestle with various midlife disappointments: her divorce, Papa’s death, a downturn in business at the family restaurant, and, above all, her childlessness. After several miscarriages, she, a successful ad exec, and husband Conlan, a reporter, befriended a pregnant young girl and planned to adopt her baby—and then the birth mother changed her mind. Angie and Conlan drifted apart and soon found they just didn’t love each other anymore. Metaphorically speaking, “her need for a child had been a high tide, an overwhelming force that drowned them. A year ago, she could have kicked to the surface but not now.” Sadder but wiser, Angie goes to work in the struggling family restaurant, bickering with Mama over updating the menu and replacing the ancient waitress. Soon, Angie befriends another young girl, Lauren Ribido, who’s eager to learn and desperately needs a job. Lauren’s family lives on the wrong side of the tracks, and her mother is a promiscuous alcoholic, but Angie knows nothing of this sad story and welcomes Lauren into the DeSaria family circle. The girl listens in, wide-eyed, as the sisters argue and make wisecracks and—gee-whiz—are actually nice to each other. Nothing at all like her relationship with her sluttish mother, who throws Lauren out when boyfriend David, en route to Stanford, gets her pregnant. Will Lauren, who’s just been accepted to USC, let Angie adopt her baby? Well, a bit of a twist at the end keeps things from becoming too predictable.
Heartfelt, yes, but pretty routine.Pub Date: July 1, 2004
ISBN: 0-345-46750-7
Page Count: 400
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2004
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.
Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.
Yanagihara (The People in the Trees, 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.
The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.Pub Date: March 10, 2015
ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8
Page Count: 720
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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